The Essential Moral Perfection of God

Religious Studies 23 (1):137 - 144 (1987)
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Abstract

Many theists of a traditional bent have been bothered by the apparent tension between God's essential omnipotence and his essential moral goodness. Nelson Pike draws attention to the conflict between these two attributes in his article ‘Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin’, and there have been many attempts to respond to it since that time. Most of these responses argue that the essential omnipotence and essential goodness of God are not logically incompatible, so that the traditional conception of God is not incoherent; I think the arguments have been largely successful. However, some theists have found the typical responses to Pike less than convincing, and are tempted to surrender the claim that God has moral perfection essentially in favour of the more modest claim that God is morally perfect in the actual world though in some possible worlds God is morally defective. I argue in this paper that this fall-back position is incoherent. More accurately, I argue that a necessary being who is essentially omniscient and essentially omnipotent cannot be contingently morally perfect or contingently morally defective. Any such being is either essentially good or essentially evil. Since the latter alternative seems unattractive, I argue that theists should embrace the essential moral perfection of God

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Citations of this work

Freedom and the Incarnation.Timothy Pawl & Kevin Timpe - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (11):743-756.
Perfect Goodness.Mark Murphy - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

The Nature of Necessity.Desmond Paul Henry - 1975 - Philosophical Quarterly 25 (99):178-180.
A Response to the Modal Problem of Evil.Laura L. Garcia - 1984 - Faith and Philosophy 1 (4):378-388.
Can God do evil?Joshua Hoffman - 1979 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 17 (2):213-220.
Omnipotence and Impeccability.Jerome Gellman - 1977 - New Scholasticism 51 (1):21-37.

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